Vesper moved through the void like a thought.
The darkness between remnants of worlds was her sanctuary. She no longer needed to hop between perceived points; she could simply flow, a river of secrecy pouring through the cracks of a dying reality.
Her previous journey had been a simple A-to-B reconnaissance. This was a hunt. She carried her Progenitor's holy parameters in her mind, not as a checklist, but as a divining rod. She was not just looking for a place. She was looking for a specific vintage of despair.
The sheer scale of the Unraveling was far greater than she had initially perceived. The grey nebula of the fallen angelkin kingdom was not a unique anomaly. It was one of thousands. She passed through the ghosts of countless worlds, each a cloud of decaying concepts. She saw the spectral imprint of a city of towering glass spires being eaten by geometric, crystalline static. She glided through the fading memory of a great swamp where the ghosts of leviathans swam through mists of chronological decay.
Most were silent tombs, the final exhalation of a world already gone. But some… some still had echoes.
As she drifted through one particularly dense region of fading reality, a sound brushed against her consciousness.
...da-dum... da-dum... da-dum...
It was a heartbeat. Slow. Colossal. Faint.
She followed the sound. It led her to an object of impossible scale: the corpse of a dragon. It was easily the size of a mountain range, its skeletal ribs forming vast, cathedral-like arches against the blue void. Its flesh was long gone, but the bones themselves were being unmade, crumbling into fine white dust at the edges. The slow, rhythmic beat was the last echo of its life-force, a fading pulse of primordial magic.
Fascinating, she thought, her mind a cold, cataloging instrument. But it fails the primary directive. No political instability. No population. She flowed onward.
Her next discovery was a fleet of ships. They were not made of wood, but of some polished, insect-like carapace. Their sails were tattered membranes, and they floated in a perfectly preserved formation, like flies trapped in amber. A faint psychic hum emanated from them, a gestalt consciousness of a hive-mind species, now caught in a silent, looping moment of terror just before their world was erased. They were trapped, not dying.
No external threat other than the obvious, Vesper assessed. And the society is a hive-mind. Too stable. She moved on, the silent screams of the insectoid fleet fading behind her.
It was when she was beginning to believe that nothing coherent was left that she found it.
It wasn't a sudden discovery. It was a gradual dawning. A scent on the cosmic wind. The faint taste of… rot. Not the clean, entropic rot of The Bleed, but the messy, organic rot of life going sour. Fear. Greed. Despair.
She followed the scent. Soon, a solid object resolved itself in the distance. It wasn't an echo or a ghost. It was real. An island of matter, similar to the Sanctum, but far larger and not floating by any divine will. It looked like a chunk of a continent that had been sheared off, a raw, bleeding edge of reality adrift in the sea of nothingness.
And on it… a city.
From a distance, it looked magnificent. A wall of white stone ringed a collection of towers and spires that climbed towards the empty blue sky. A great bridge of stone, now ending in a jagged break over the edge of the void, spoke of a time when this city had been part of a greater whole.
This was a fragment. A survivor.
Vesper approached with supernatural stealth, her form indistinguishable from a flicker of shadow. She passed through the great outer wall like a wisp of smoke, ignoring the armored guards who stood listlessly on its battlements.
The city within was… a disaster. A perfect, multi-layered catastrophe. The Progenitor would be pleased.
Parameter One: Political Instability.
The architecture in the upper districts was pristine marble and gold leaf. Decadent nobles in silks and jewels flitted between garden parties, their laughter shrill and desperate. But in the lower districts, the buildings were crumbling slums of timber and thatch, overflowing with the poor, the sick, and the starving. The city was a powder keg of class tension, a jewel balanced on a knife's edge. Vesper slipped through the shadows of the royal palace and heard the whispers. King Theron the Pious, once a mighty ruler, was now a bedridden old man, his mind clouded by age and grief. His two sons, the brutish Prince Galien and the cunning, manipulative Prince Lorian, were locked in a cold war for the succession, turning the noble houses against each other in a deadly game of intrigue. The kingdom of Eldoria was not just fractured; it was actively tearing itself apart from the top down.
Parameter Two: A Clear and Present External Threat.
Vesper ghosted to the northern border of the floating landmass. Here, the city gave way to blighted farmland. A crude, sprawling war camp festered on the plains—the domain of the Groll. They were hulking, brutish creatures, a mix of boar and man, their bodies covered in thick, bristly hides and adorned with crude iron armor. They were not a random horde. They were an army, organized and patient, their siege engines and war banners pointed directly at the city walls. The whispers she'd overheard confirmed it: the Groll were led by a new Warlord, a cunning brute named Skull-Taker, who was uniting the clans. The nobles were too busy with their backstabbing to mount a proper defense, and the city's conscripted army was a dispirited, poorly equipped mess. The Groll weren't a threat; they were an inevitability.
Parameter Three: Internal Rot.
The Church of the Faded Sun was the dominant religion in Eldoria. Vesper slipped into its grand cathedral, a magnificent structure with stained-glass windows depicting a sun god she knew was long since erased from existence. High Priest Valerius preached sermons of faith and sacrifice to the masses while, as Vesper observed from the rafters of his private chambers, embezzling tithes to fund his lavish lifestyle and using blackmail to control key members of the noble council. Meanwhile, in the stinking alleys of the lower city, a new cult was festering. They called themselves the Children of the Final Slumber. They didn't preach salvation; they preached acceptance of the inevitable end. They actively helped The Bleed, sabotaging infrastructure and whispering promises of a "painless unmaking" to the hopeless. It was a cancer growing in the city's heart.
Parameter Four: Good Dungeons.
Vesper's final survey took her deep beneath the city. Under the very cathedral she had just spied on, she found it: the Catacombs of the First Kings. An ancient, sprawling network of tombs and forgotten passages. The air was thick with the dust of ages and a faint, palpable malevolence. She saw ancient traps, rusted shut but still potent. She saw sigils of warding magic so old they predated the Church of the Faded Sun. And in the deepest chamber, she sensed a presence—something old, powerful, and deeply resentful, sleeping fitfully in its sarcophagus.
It was perfect. A political nightmare, an imminent military disaster, rife with corruption and heresy, and it all sat atop a classic, high-level undead dungeon. It was a kingdom screaming for a reset button.
Vesper stood on the highest spire of the Royal Palace, invisible to all, a shadow against the endless blue. She looked down upon the beautiful, dying city of Aethelgard, the last bastion of the Kingdom of Eldoria. It was a buffet of suffering.
She allowed herself a thin, fleeting smile.
Her Progenitor's first playground.
She took a single step back, melting into the shadow cast by the flagpole, and vanished from the world, the cries of the damned city fading behind her.